‘Take that, Marti Pellow!’ Sam Fender and Olivia Dean’s Rein Me In beats Wet Wet Wet’s UK chart record

Sam Fender and Olivia Dean have broken Wet Wet Wet’s 32-year record for a British act’s run at No 1 in the UK singles chart. Fender and Dean’s duet Rein Me In has racked up its 16th week at No 1, beating Wet Wet Wet’s Love is All Around, which spent 15 weeks at No 1 in the summer of 1994 after it appeared on the Four Weddings and a Funeral soundtrack. Unlike Wet Wet Wet’s consecutive run, though, Fender and Dean’s song has dropped in and out of the top spot since February. “Take that, Marti Pellow!” Fender told the Official Charts Company as the news was announced. He added that the success of Rein Me In has been “ridiculous – every Friday, it’s been an excuse to party”. Rein Me In also scores the longest consecutive run for a song in the Top 40, with 55 weeks, beating Ed Sheeran’s record for his ballad Thinking Out Loud. But Fender and Dean are yet to beat two non-UK acts who have an equal or greater run at No 1 in the UK. They draw level with Canada’s Bryan Adams, whose (Everything I Do) I Do It For You spent 16 weeks in a row at the top in 1991 – like Wet Wet Wet, Adams’ song was a determinedly corny power ballad aided by a prominent film placing, in Adams’ case Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. US crooner Frankie Laine has the longest run at No 1, with 18 non-consecutive weeks in 1953 for his epic ballad I Believe (“for every drop of rain that falls / a flower grows …”), back when the UK chart featured just 12 songs. Sam Fender, Olivia Dean – Rein Me In Rein Me In started life as an album track on Fender’s chart-topping, Mercury prize-winning 2025 release People Watching. A wracked mid-tempo number about self-sabotaging a romantic relationship, it shows off Fender’s knack for kitchen-sink poetry: “Every flagstone of this town bears our prints / And all the bars round here serve my ghosts and carcasses … I’m working myself up to a nice, warm bliss / All my memories of you ring like tinnitus.” Dean added her own verse, voicing the other figure in the rela…